


Burning Chrome

by ShrimpZilla



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 10:14:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4097131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShrimpZilla/pseuds/ShrimpZilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nux and Capable consent to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Chrome

**Author's Note:**

> written for the kink meme.  
> my first Mad Max fic.

Nux is a War Boy.

He knows driving and fighting and taking.

He knows darkness. 

He knows pain. 

His half-life is a twisted thing, branded and knotted and sweat-drenched from fevers. He lives with fire in his bones, burning out from within. The heat of the chrome gates of Valhalla beckoning him with every strangled breath his body struggles in. Sleep leeches what little life he has to spare, sucks it from his blood and wastes it so that he wakes in puddles and damp sheets thirstier and weaker than ever. So he doesn’t sleep if he can avoid it and instead lives his life hot-eyed and manic. He lives on borrowed blood and energy and life. Fills himself with high octane stuff that might last if he ever stopped moving but he can’t and so he burns it up, burns it up, burns it up good. His heart pounding whirring shaking inside his chest until his teeth chatter and it’s all he can do to stop from screaming to vent the steam from this boiled blood. 

Nux is a War Boy.

He knows he has nothing to offer, nothing to give, nothing worth the way she looks at him. 

He knows that the Immorten will shred him for looking, for thinking, for wanting in the deepest pit of his stomach to have her smile or laugh or anything, really, that isn’t fear and running and violation. 

He knows the others do not trust him the way she does, Capable, so kind and shiny and pure. Good like guzzoline and oil and the sun on his shoulders as he drives, warm and soothing and nothing that he could ever tell Slit about because smiling into the sunshine is just so soft a thing to do that even though he loves it he thinks of it with shame.   
Her hair blows in the wind like a flare of flames behind her head. It shimmers, smooth and sinful like a mirage on the horizon that pulls you in and sucks you down and that’s no kind of death for a War Boy. But he knows that he would be so lucky to die in her, because of her, for her. It would be the most historic, the most chrome he’d ever hope be. Valhalla three times chewed him up and spat him out, but Capable would never do that. She is his Fury Road. He sees it like he’s never seen anything before, stares at her wide eyed and wondering as she lays herself before him and he wonders has any War Boy faced so glorious an end? Fire and sand and sun bleached bone, the curves and plains and sky above and oh, by the V8 he has been blessed.

“Nux,” she says his name and his vision snaps to focus, blurred as it had been from staring too long at her radiance. His heart is heaving, up and down up and down and he doesn’t think it’s ever worked like this before. His bones tremble, cold suddenly as if he has been doused in water. His body forged by the fire of Valhalla and the calm cool care of Capable’s hands on his chest. He is stronger for it though he feels weaker in this moment than he has ever felt. “Hold me, Nux.” 

He hesitates, keeps his hands pressed flat and hard to the floor, because he is a War Boy. He does not know these little touches that she gives him so freely, the ones that light up his skin and push his eyelids down and make him feel his body is not quite the prison of flesh it has been made out to be. He has never been touched so gently, so wonderfully, so much like he is a good and beautiful engine and her hands are black thumbs working through him and forgiving any kinks and broken bits because it is just a pleasure to fix, to touch. “Capable,” he says like a prayer given over to the V8, to the Immorten, to Valhalla. She leans closer, her hands sliding up over his scars and resting on his shoulders. Her eyes are the sky and the stars and Acqua Cola. He can forget his water addiction if only he could look into those eyes for the rest of his miserable days. 

He wants to touch her so he fists his hands and presses his knuckles into the metal floor of the crow’s nest, digs them in deep until he feels the sting of skin splitting. The pain is like a slap, a punch, a bullet straight to the warm building place in his guts that beats and bangs and once said Valhalla and now says Capable. “I want you to hold me,” she reassures. Capable so smart and good and clever to read him the way no one ever could. He doesn’t know if there was anything worth reading before her, isn’t sure if there is anything worth reading now but Capable does it, bless her love her keep her safe, she does it. She looks at him and sees him and he cannot understand how one wispy half-life turned away so many times and left to die of something still and weak and pathetic could attract the attention of one so clearly destined and holy and chrome. “Do you want to hold me, Nux?” 

“Yes!” He asserts to eagerly. She smiles and he wants to hit his head before remembering that her smiles are not cruel things, sharp around the edges and meant to make him feel like less. Her smiles are real and true and lovely. The shape of the wheel in his hands. Yes, that is what Capable’s smiles are like. “I want to hold you, but…” He trails, leans firmly down on his split knuckles to clear his head of the fog of want that he has never known before. He has wanted things. More food, more water, more war and death and blood and glory. Never like this. Never wanted something in a way that left him heaving and shaking, that stuck its hand deep into his stomach and wiggled, that made him smile and swell and dream. He wants to hold Capable. He wants to touch her like he did when he kissed her cheek that once, gentle and swift and how he managed something so right is beyond him. But he is a War Boy and he does not know gentle. He does not know right. He does not know the things that she deserves only taking and hurting and he does not want her to look at him the way she looks when remembering the Immorten. 

“Nux,” she says solidly, “I want you to hold me.” He lifts his hands, feels the lingering sting of his self-injury. Capable does not like to see him hurt himself but she doesn’t see the blood on his knuckles and so he thinks that if he gets out of control he can reel himself back with the pain. He thinks. He hopes. A strange thing for a War Boy to hope for more than a good death, fire and glory, explosions to break open the gates to a full-life of war and revelry. He wraps his arms around her waist as lightly as the gauzy clothes that hang from her. His inner arm brushes the skin of her waist and he thinks he might collapse from the smoothness that is warm without burning, a touch without pain. “Thank you,” she whispers, leaning her face close to his. Her hands move up his neck, fingertips brushing Larry and Barry and his heart stutters when he feels it and he stiffens waiting for her to pull away and spit on him in disgust because he is disgusting and weak. But her touch doesn’t linger, doesn’t call attention to his mates and merely glides over his skin until she is holding his face. Her thumb rubs a scar by his eye as if she could dust it away as she has some of his war paint. He relaxes, hands intertwined at the base of her back. Slowly his muscles unclench and his sense of fight or flight loosens until he cannot even recall being afraid of anything. Not darkness or Larry or Barry or the Immorten. “Hold me closer, please, if you don’t mind.” Her hesitance hits him hard, a punch in the gut and he knee-jerk pulls her in close and tight. Angry for a moment. At himself. At his inability to do what she needs. At the way he is built small and weak and mediocre. 

“I would do anything for you,” he grinds out. Words are hard for him when they are the tendrils of feeling that wrap around him whenever Capable is near. “You don’t even have to ask. Anything. I would do it. I am yours—“ He stumbles out, eager now that he has started to fill the spaces where she might reject him. She puts her thumbs on the ridges of his lips, silencing him like she had when she found him. His body melts into the contact. 

“No, Nux. You are not a thing. I can’t own you. We make our own decisions.” She has said these things before to him. He grasps their meaning, dully and distantly. Capable is not a thing. She is Capable. She is wonderful. She is not a Wife, not a breeder, not a thing to be possessed. She says the same of him. He is not a thing. He is Nux. He is good. He is not a War Boy, not cannon fodder, not a thing to be used. He feels the words whole-heartedly and vibrates with the very truth of them when she and the others say it of themselves. Yes, he nods eagerly, yes they are people and they are not things and they are in charge of their lives. But him? Nux? He is a War Boy, and if not a War Boy then what could he possibly be? So no, he thinks when they encourage him, he is a War Boy a thing to be used. But it is his choice to be used by who and he says them: the Women, Capable. He is their War Boy, her War Boy, and he will skin himself to the bone and go up in flames if it means that his half-life could save Capable’s real life, true life, full life. 

“I…” He doesn’t know what to say. He knows he cannot tell her the truth of the matter. The way that his heart is beating only her name and his veins are filled with her hair and how every moment he is one slip of control away from screaming to keep the tears of happiness from rolling fat and wasted down his cheeks. “I want to do anything for you,” he tries and though she tries to hide it he can see the deep well of emotion it causes in her eyes. He licks his dry lips with a dry tongue and continues, adjusting her in his lap against the fluttering feeling in his guts like an engine that won’t kick over. She stretches her legs out over his hips, rests her elbows on her knees, and holds the back of his head while he talks. “I want to do things that will make you happy.” He grins there to show her that happy Capable makes happy Nux though he is certain his smile is ugly and horrible and he has seen the way Cheedo looks at him sidelong when he does it with something like fear lurking in her eyes. “Please,” and it is a word he has mostly learned from Capable this please, this may I, this let me but only if you want and he is so grateful that she has given him the language he needs to speak to her. Otherwise he would not even dare. “Please tell me what you want. I will give it to you if I can.”

“And what if you can’t?” She breathes and he inhales that breath as if it will sustain him because honestly he thinks it might. He wants to say he’ll burn the world to the ground, choke the life from anyone who stood in her way, but he knows these aren’t the things she likes to hear. They are War Boy things not Capable things and they are wrong and bad but he cannot stop them from skittering across his mind. Instead he whispers words on a whine that make him feel weak:

“I’ll try.” Water wells in her eyes and Nux doesn’t understand what he’s done to bring it there. “Capable, please,” he voice cracks passed a tightness in his throat so unlike Larry and Barry that he isn’t sure what to think, “tell me what you want me to do.”

“Kiss me.” His heart soars because here is a task he can accomplish. His face hurts from the smile that breaks out across him. He dips his mouth to her cheek, presses his mutilated mouth to the place along the line of bone that entrances him most, and pulls back eager to see the look his action might have put on her face. Her lips twitch into smile that cracks quickly into a laugh and his shoulders fall back as his chest swells with pride. 

“Again?” He asks breathlessly and she nods happily still smiling and laughing and he presses another to her other cheek. “Again?” And she nods and he kisses her chin. Again and nod and forehead. Again and nod and nose. Again and nod and he puts his lips on her lips and her laughter fails and her eyes go wide and Nux realizes he has done something wrong, he doesn’t know he isn’t sure and a terror he has never known grasps his chest and he pulls himself away from her mouth. One of his hands has freed itself from holding her and is crashing down on his head, eyes closed against the assault and against whatever it is that he has done to Capable to ruin her smile and her laugh and this one sweet moment.

“Nux, what are you doing?” Capable asks, pulling his face to her chest so that he cannot hit himself without running the risk of hitting her and that is a thing he would never do. So he stops, stills, smells the way of her skin as she rests his ear against the flat of her chest before her neck and cradles him. 

“You weren’t smiling…” he mutters dumbly because he doesn’t want to speak too loud and chase away the sound of her heart in his ear. He holds his breaths until they are in time with hers and tries to force his heart into the same rhythm that beats down through him from her. He would live and die likes this and be… happy. Capable shifts him so that she can look down into this eyes. She is smiling wonderful and shiny and no one has ever looked at him the way that she looks at him. If there was enough water left in him he thinks it would be in his eyes. 

“Because you were kissing my mouth, silly, and I wanted to kiss you back.” He sits up at that and rewraps his arms around her waist. Hers fall easily over his shoulders, holding around the back of his neck. He feels her slid further down on his lap, feels her knees bend up and press along his sides. Everything feels funny. Everything feels soft and it is the first time he has thought the word without anger and derision. 

“Oh.” He runs his eyes along the length of her arms that hold him. “Can I…” Another pointless swipe of his tongue across his lips. “Can I kiss you again?” She nods and then a moment later when he hasn’t moved she says,

“Yes.” The sound of it. He didn’t know, never knew that something could sound so sweet as Valhalla and engines and war parties howling at the moon. Yes, he repeats it in his head. Yes, she says to him. Capable says to Nux. It bubbles within him. Yes, yes, yes. Glory in such a word as Yes. 

Slowly he leans his face to hers. Like an animal in a corner, caged and ready to fight. Slowly and his eyes never leave hers. He will see it if it happens, the displeasure the fear the memories of the man that he needs to remind himself so often is not a god, and he will stop it before it starts. She has to say yes but he will never make it so that she must say no. No, which might kill him, wound him, take from him this one small joy that he has only known so short a time. He will not make her say it. He will not. He will stop. He will. His lips brush against hers and he wonders at the feeling. Bright, full, deep sensation that floods him. She presses harder and the pressure, Glory be! Capable tilts her head, her body against as if it was meant to be that way, and he worries that his scars bite into her flesh too roughly or that his lips are too dry and are scouring hers or that—

And his mind goes blank, white hot, thoughts seared from his skull by this, Capable’s tongue against his lips. He pulls back, thrown by this newness this hot wetness, and runs his tongue along where hers had just been to gather the moisture she has so graciously given to him. A gift from skies and the earth and this living creature of perfection that sits so content in his lap and looks at him with something, something Nux does not have a word for except to think oh, Immorten, why did you want to ruin something so lovely? “I like that,” he says before she can ask because she is Capable and she cares what he thinks and so he tells her. “Again? Please?” Maybe he is begging and maybe that is not how a War Boy speaks but what War Boy has ever had something like this happen to him? What War Boy has ever known Capable? They lean in to each other once again and Capable’s tongue traces the ridges on his lips, his skin crawling up from his feet to his head and he shudders into it all with more than water hunger driving him. He touches his tongue to where hers has just passed, desperate for the taste of her in a way he has not known to be desperate for a taste before. He is quick and clumsy and his tongue meets hers and they caress each other lightly, uncertainly. He can feel his lips crying out in ecstasy under the coat of her saliva. His tongue wants that same beauty and so when he feels Capable’s hands grasping at the back of his head he pushes forward, eyes open and watching until she nods and their mouths are open on each other. 

“Capable, Capable, glory be, oh, lovely Capable,” he mutters incoherently when they break for air, kissing between the words along her jaw and to her ear and he shivers when she shivers and he tongues her earlobe, presses his nose into her hair and nuzzles and kisses and whines with the happiness that has nowhere to go in his stupid, wasted, War Boy heart. “You are chrome,” he kisses from her ear down her neck, listening attentively to her repetitions of yes and please and Nux and more. She is trembling as if cold and so he holds her tighter, tries to heat her with his fevered skin. “Straight chrome sent from above. Burning, burning chrome and glory.” He licks her collarbone, traces it left and right, and runs his nose down the center of her chest. Beneath his Capable moistened breath he sees the roundness of her chest sharpen to small peaks, feels Capable grind herself down onto his buckles and the strange stiffness of his pole in his pants. He cries out at the feel of it and folds the sound over in his mouth to make words for her. “Yes, Capable, Capable. You are burning Capable and glory, a gift.” He kisses her chest. Closed mouth first and then open and desperate circles when she hisses at him. 

“With your tongue, Nux, please. My breasts. With your tongue. That’s what I want.” He complies desperate for the sound of her pleased with him, desperate too for the taste of her through her cloth, desperate for the feel of her chest hard against his tongue. Desperate, desperate, desperate. She is grinding harder down on him. “Nux,” she gasps as he sucks on her, “what should I do? For you? What do you want?”

“Capable. I want Capable, I want you, oh.” She slides off his lap like everything he has ever dared to want has slipped from him. His car, Valhalla, the Immorten’s pride. His mind feels like it has stalled and he can’t understand why she has left him, why he is fevered and alone with hands open and out and this twitching in his hips that he cannot control. 

“Take me,” she says and he feels the words like guzzoline revving him. He bends at the waist, his forehead on the floor and his hands out in front of him still. He fights the urge to lace his fingers together to worship her the way he worshiped him. So he makes a new ritual in his head, this on the floor hands open and knees bent sort of ritual that occurs to him only because he is too lightheaded for anything real. 

“I don’t know how. We don’t… The War Boys, we’re not meant for that. A half-life can’t… breeding, rutting. No, not for us…” He rambles because there is so much in him he wants to explain. He is rusted junk, a gutted out machine with no wheels, no guzzoline, nothing but scrap metal waiting to be made useful. Capable’s strong fingers lift his head and there is a fierceness to her. No Wife, no breeder, Capable is warrior she is strength and shiny strong metal and pure. Is it wrong to want something so much better than he deserves? Is it wrong to reach and hope and strive for the affection of a person who is whole and good and strong?

“Do you want me to show you?”

His throat is dry and tight and he cannot breath but he must answer, he must tell Capable yes yes yes with everything he has in him the answer is yes, always, Capable, beautiful wonderful lovely, Capable, yes, please he will beg it of everything that the world has, he will go naked into the Citadel and fight against his once-brothers, Boys and Pups and Imperators all. 

He swallows, clears the lump out of his throat and says it all just as he thought it, a wild ramble that leaves him breathless and Capable staring with a smile hanging on her lips and she says nothing so he scrambles onto his knees and holds the hands that held his head. He kisses her fingers, her knuckles, her palms. He kisses the thudding pulse point on her wrist, the feel of her life an all-encompassing feeling of safe and right and thank the V8 he has his to fight for.

Capable takes the lead. She is the driver and he is the rig. He lays him on his back and undoes his pants. She looks at his pole and he wonders if there is something he is missing, something that has left him incomplete. “Is it wrong?” He asks and the look Capable gives him breaks him a little bit because it is so sad. Something so wrong with him to make her look like that. He sits up on his elbows and hooks a hand into his belt but her hand on his hand stops him, stills him.

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Nux. I’ve just… never seen a man naked that wasn’t the Immorten. I just wanted to look for a moment. If you don’t mind.” 

“To have you look at me,” he starts and stops, doesn’t know what he wants to say or how he wants to say it. Instead he simply nods, lays himself back, and says, “Yes.”

Nux is a War Boy. 

He does not know the good things in life. 

He does not know affection and kindness.

He does not know anything other than Capable unwrapping her skirt and sliding over him, hot and wet and shiny so shiny so so so shiny. She opens to him the way the gates of   
Valhalla did not and in the thick headed thoughtless explosion of hot feeling that overwhelms him he thinks he has died. Finally died historic and come hail his glory! He has found his purpose, the way and why of how he was built, made for this place between Capable’s legs. He fits to her like nuts and bolts and he thinks he has wasted so much of his pathetic half-life not laying on his back thrusting up into Valhalla the way he was meant to do. 

“Yes, yes, yes, Nux, this, this is what I want,” Capable calls to him, sings to him, builds him up. He holds her hips and thighs and breasts, snorting and grunting and trying his hardest to do things that he thinks are good for her because everything she does is good for him. He would cut his heart out of his chest for her if she asked him. Shine up with his precious, rare spit and lay at her feet for her do with as she pleased. It is hers. He is hers. War Boy, a thing, Nux, hers, Capable, take him please let him be whatever you want, whatever you need. Yours yours yours. Capable. 

When it is over he thinks he has used up what is left of his half-life and he does not care. Capable lays down next to him, head on his shoulder, fingers on his scars. He kisses the top of her head sloppy and dull still from the force of this new world that Capable has showed him. His eyes close and his breath hums happily and his heart beats slow and regular and he forgot that hearts could beat like that or maybe he never really knew that to begin with. “Yes, Capable,” he mutters as his mind slackens and his body stills and what he thinks is death but is really sleep takes hold. The feel of Capable in arms, her weight against his chest, her hair under his nose.

Nux is a War Boy.

He knows happiness.


End file.
